To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.

Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.

Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll be of good cheer.

One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.